Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Ty Carter Brunson, I cannot believe you are already 5 and 1/2 weeks old! It seems like just yesterday that we found out we were pregnant with you! It has been quite the whirlwind and it definitely threw our lives upside down when you came, in a good way.

You were born 5 weeks early for reasons that no one knows. I'm thinking it's because your dad and I are very impatient, and sadly, that probably passed on to you, too! Because you were so early, you needed help with a few things. The doctors put you in the Newborn Intensive Care Unit (NICU) to monitor your breathing, oxygen levels, heart rate, and they also had to help you learn how to eat and gain weight. You were there for two weeks and made incredible progress!

When you came home from the hospital, you were two weeks old. I was terrified to be solely responsible for you and was nervous that I'd do something wrong, but I was also incredibly relieved to not have to worry about the dumb monitor that beeped every time I held you because your leads came off, or your oxygen detector wiggled off your foot, making it seem like someone was dying. I was so glad that the nurses were no longer in charge of everything and that I could finally be your mom!

The first day that you were out of the hospital, we spent at Grandma and Grandpa Brunson's house, but the following day, Saturday, we took you to our home! It was so wonderful to look around at all of the baby stuff in our house and finally have, in our arms, the perfect little tiny human to go with everything!

Up until this last week, you were actually a decent sleeper! You'd wake up every two hours or so to eat, and then you'd fall back asleep! Our days were very mundane. Because you'd eat every two hours, I didn't always feel very well rested at 8 in the morning, so I just kept sleeping. When I finally got out of bed, all I wanted to do was snuggle with you! So, that's all I did for about two weeks straight! We had dishes piling up in our sink, clothes overflowing our laundry basket, but I just held you tight until it was time to go get dad from work. Then he and I would switch off holding you, and it was perfect!

For about the last week or two, you became quite gassy at night. I don't know if it was something I did, or if it was the vitamins that the hospital told me to give you, but nights turned into a miserable time of day that I dreaded. You would wake up, I'd feed you for about 30 minutes, put you back to bed, get in my own bed, and then five minutes later you were crying again. So I'd have to sit with you for about an hour squishing your knees up to your stomach trying to help you get rid of your gas. I didn't mind doing this because I hated seeing you in pain, but boy did it make me tired. So after an hour of that, you were finally happy and sleepy. I'd put you down in bed, and you'd wake up half an hour later to eat. And this has been happening for almost two weeks!

Grandma House came to visit during that time (May 22-29) and on her last night here, she took care of you all night so that I could sleep, and I slept for 7 hours straight! It was a nice reboot for sure. And then this past weekend on Saturday night, you slept!!! I put you to bed and you fell asleep for two and a half hours, woke up to eat, and then slept for three and a half hours! It might not seem like much, but boy was it amazing! Definitely worth remembering! But then you were back to not sleeping very well and having an upset stomach, so I knew I was going to have to do something about it.

Two days ago, I took you to the doctor and asked if I could stop giving you the vitamin (Polyvisol) because I thought that might be part of your gassy/upset stomach, and he said that was fine. I also realized that you don't really like to sleep on your back, but that you prefer sleeping on my chest, in someone's arms, or on your stomach. So that night, I let you sleep on your stomach on our bed. You loved it! You slept for three and a half hours! Last night, you were constantly hungry and mad that I kept putting you on your back to sleep, so I took you into the front room, fed you, and then fell asleep on the couch. You slept on my chest for about 4 hours, and it was glorious!

Moral of the story, night time is still a work in progress for us, but I think we're getting there!

You are now almost 6 weeks old (on Friday) and you are so dang cute! You are very expressive with your facial expressions! Every time you're awake, you have such a quizzical look on your face like you're trying to decipher everything that you see. When you sleep, your mind is thinking like crazy and I can tell because your eyes are constantly moving, opening, and you make the cutest faces!

You love being held really tightly, so we bought these "Swaddlers" that velcro super tight and you love being wrapped up in them! You do really well when I put you on your stomach for tummy time!

When I decided to buy Focus T25 and Shakeology, I knew that I would also have to start eating healthier to see any results. That freaked me out! I have tried to eat healthy before, and when I can't find anything fast and easy or healthy at all, I would start skipping meals, become starving, and then eat anything that I could find.

In hopes to help you out and get you started on your eating healthy goal, I thought I'd give you some helpful tips that I've learned these past 4 months!

Start off by finding some good recipes! Here is my healthy food board on Pinterest that focuses on main dishes, and I have a few other healthy food boards as well! Pinterest is a wonderful website for you to find pretty much anything, so type in "Healthy meals" or something, and you'll find a ton of results!!

Once you've found some good recipes (don't skimp out on this part and think you'll be able to find something later.. Do your research NOW! Unless you're hungry.. if that's the case, eat something, then come back and do your research.), MAKE YOUR MEAL PLAN! It's better to eat 5-6 smaller meals a day rather than 3 large ones. Download a meal planner, or make your own! I use a calendar white board from Walmart and each column is one day. So I have Breakfast, Snack, Lunch, Snack, Dinner. Some people add an extra snack after dinner, but I've found that most days I don't need one.. and I don't have room on this calendar! If I ever do need an after dinner snack, scrambled egg whites are my fall back!

If you have your meal plan somewhere that you can easily see it, you will be more likely to plan ahead if you need to and not have to wonder what you can eat!

That's the next tip.. plan ahead!! Do all of your grocery shopping for the week!! It's going to be hard to make crock pot orange chicken for dinner if you don't have oranges or chicken! I decided to make a three bean salad that has green beans, kidney beans, white beans, vinegar, and olive oil for some snacks this week. I mixed it all together and put it in the fridge. Now I know that I can just get 1/2 cup of it when it's snack time! (I would have put it into individual tupperware containers, but I don't have enough for that.) If I didn't already have that prepped, by the time I was hungry, I probably wouldn't want to make it. But if it's easy to grab and it's healthy, you're all set!! A lot of people make a handful of their meals on one day and put them in individual containers for the week... this is really helpful if you're out of the house for most of the day!

When grocery shopping, buy more fruits and veggies than processed food (try not to buy processed food at all). If it's pre-packaged, it's most likely going to be way more unhealthy than a few apples. Make the produce section your best friend!

Now that you have a bunch of food ready, GET RID OF THE JUNK FOOD!! If you're like me, then you're going to need to eat the junk food in your house if it's there.. I just can't help it! Donate it to a friend, or just help everyone out and throw it away. You don't need any temptations!!!

Don't skip any meals!! You should be eating within an hour of waking up, and then every meal should be 2-3 hours after your last meal. When you skip meals, your metabolism slows down thinking that you're starving, so instead of burning the food you eat, it stores it into fat. NO GOOD!

When you're first starting out, there might be a few meals that just never end up sounding good to you.. This is another circumstance where planning your meals a week out helps! If Tuesday's dinner doesn't sound good, and you've already bought all the ingredients for the super yummy dinner you had planned for Thursday, make Thursday's dinner instead!! I do this all the time, because my taste buds are quite spontaneous.

Always have a water bottle with you!! In one of my challenge groups, I won a camelbak water bottle that holds like 26 ounces, and it is always by me! It's a lot easier to make sure you get your water in if you have a cute water bottle that holds more than the typical "16oz" disposable water bottles. ALSO, cut out all your other beverages!! No more soda, coffee, juice, just water!! You might feel like you need the other drinks, but cut them out for two weeks and you'll see that water is really what you need!

If you have a smart phone, download the "My Fitness Pal" app. It allows you to search for foods, scan the barcode of your store-bought foods, or put in the nutritional information on your own. You can put in everything you ate and drank for the day, as well as how much water you drank! At the end of the day, you can hit "complete entry" and it tells you how much you would weigh in 5 weeks if you kept eating/drinking/exercising like you did that day!! It's also really nice to stay accountable, and if you're going to be documenting what you eat, you're more likely to skip those five candy bars in your cupboard! (Although if you threw the junk food away, you won't have this problem!)

There are so many other things I could say, but one last thing is how to reward yourself. We are in the type of society where we feel the need to celebrate with food. You got awesome grades? Let's go out to a fancy dinner! It's your 3 month anniversary? Get donuts!!

WRONG!! Skip the food and reward yourself in other ways!! When I completed working out for a month straight, I bought myself some new clothes! You can get a pedicure, buy new shoes, get your hair done, buy that special face mask that you've been wanting to try. Get your mind out of the habit of thinking that food is the best way to treat yourself.

You can do this!! You will feel better when you eat better, I promise!! If you need any help or motivation, feel free to email me (shaylingetsfit@gmail.com), text me, leave a comment, anything!! I want you to feel healthier!! If you missed my transformation post, check it out here!

Also, make sure to come back next week for a few of my favorite meals!!

Saturday, October 18, 2014

Growing up and all through high school/college, I never really thought of myself as overweight. I was never "skinny" or what I wanted to look like, but I wasn't upset with my weight or body type. I was generally between 135-140 pounds. I never worked at it, and I never had good eating habits, but I guess all the dance parties and random outings with friends had me more active and kept me within that weight range. When I got married at the beginning of 2012, it seemed like it was overnight that I gained a few pounds, and then a few more pounds. And then all of a sudden I was 169 pounds. Um, what?! I was super self conscious, hated the way I looked, the way clothes fit me, and my energy levels were dirt!! But did I care enough to do anything about it then? NOPE! I was just super complainy.. (not a word, I know.) POOR ME! I'M SO CHUBBY!!

Then I got pregnant, and for most people, that's when they decide to start eating healthier.. Yanno, for the baby! That wasn't the case for me! I figured I'd been living just fine eating the way I did, and I wasn't about to give up all of my candy and junk food! NO WAY!But then I had Ty. And when we finally got to bring him home, of course I was tired, I just had a baby! He was eating every two hours! I wanted to stare at him every second! But I was sleeping until 1:00 in the afternoon, taking naps all the time, and just never had the energy to do hardly anything.

I was at a family gathering and watched my sister-in-law's daughter reach for vegetables that were on the table before she reached for the candy right next to it. WHAT?! I didn't even reach for veggies.. EVER!! I thought about Ty growing up and how I wished, more than anything, that he would be a healthier eater than I was, and maybe even enjoy eating vegetables. And that's when it hit me. He's not ever going to learn to love them if they aren't even in the house! I was the one that was going to have to be his example. It all had to start withme.I tried looking around at different weight loss programs, but I knew I wanted to do something that would help me change my habits instead of going on a "diet". I needed this to be a lifestyle change. Everything that I saw was either super expensive, looked stupid, or I knew it wasn't going to stick with me.

So I decided to look on Pinterest for easy at-home workouts and I thought that I might consider doing. In the middle of June, I was browsing Facebook and came across a post that mentioned this girl who had a workout page where she posted healthy recipes and a few short videos of her working out. I checked out her page and thought to myself, "If I ever get motivated enough to workout at home, these workouts seem like a good start!" I 'liked' her page, and then she messaged me asking about my fitness goals and wanted to get to know me! So we started talking back and forth, I told her that I just had a baby and I wanted to get back in shape, and she told me about a fitness challenge group that she was going to be doing the next month, and after telling her that I suck at eating healthy, she invited me to a "Clean Eating" group that she held every month. I happily accepted, and learned that eating healthy doesn't have to be hard!I ended up really liking the accountability of having a group on Facebook where I had to say what I ate everyday. There was no way that I was going to let everyone know that I had sugar cereal for breakfast, chips as a snack, pb&j for lunch, and so on. I also got a lot of food inspiration from the other people posting everyday!! It was awesome. So then I asked about her challenge group that she was doing. She told me that I'd need to buy a fitness program, Shakeology, and I'd have one-on-one help from her, be in an accountability group on facebook where I'd need to post everyday, and I would have access to Beachbody's Online Gym!I was super excited because that seemed perfect for me! If I'm not accountable to someone, I will never finish anything. And even sometimes if I am accountable, I still don't finish. I'm kind of well known (by myself) as the girl who never finishes anything!! But I decided to give this a try, and I wanted it badly enough that I WAS GOING TO MAKE IT, DANG IT! I started looking around the Beachbody website, looked at the products, and I was kind of reserved on the price, but I knew I still wanted to do it. It looked amazing! I read a ton of success stories and saw a lot of "before and after" pictures, and I was ready!I went ahead and bought a challenge pack, which came with a 30 serving bag of Shakeology and my workout program; I chose Focus T25. It said it was only going to be 25 minutes a day, and with a two month old, time was not on my side!One of the coolest things for me was being in the facebook group. My coach had written up a bunch of her favorite healthy recipes and that was the best starting point to eating healthy, along with the sample meal plans that came with Focus T25. It helped me realize that eating healthy wasn't hard, it just took preparation.

I was told to take pictures of my body to have as my "before" pictures. For someone like me that never finishes anything, I was skeptical about the whole thing, STILL, and was worried that I was going to take these INSANELY embarrassing pictures and still look the same a month or two later. BUT, I'm so glad I took them. NEVER skip the before pictures!!!So I started working out, eating healthier, and drinking Shakeology in place of one meal a day. Because of my serious addiction to sugar, I made the commitment to give up all treats for the first month, which might not be your preferred method to do things, but I HAD to give it all up to start with. And I lost 7 pounds in the first week!! It was probably just water weight, but freak, it was 7 POUNDS! If that doesn't motivate you to keep going, I don't know what will! So I kept going, working out, drinking Shakeology (which curbed a lot of my cravings!), and I just kept seeing the pounds disappear from the scale! One month went by and I was down 10 pounds! And then after two months, with almost consistent healthy eating, drinking Shakeology, and working out everyday, my weight was 151!!! I had lost 18 pounds, I felt A MILLION times more energized, I was so much happier and friendly to my husband, and I wasn't nearly as embarrassed about what my body looked like!As far as Focus T25 is concerned, I FREAKING LOVED THESE WORK OUTS!! In fact, I'm doing them all over again, and they are still challenging to me! I get bored really easily with workouts, which is why I never stuck with Pinterest workouts or other ones that I found on youtube.. I needed something new everyday, and I also REALLY needed a schedule to follow EVERY DAY. When you buy the workout program, it comes with a rather large calendar with the designated workouts for each day and then little boxes for you to rate how you did during the workout whether you "nailed it" or "barely made it"! I loved filling in each box everyday, and I'll be honest, almost every day was "barely made it" haha. I'm sure this applies to every other type of workout, but I love that I could customize the level of workout I was getting! In the beginning, I was really overweight and couldn't jump a lot, so I followed the modifier and sometimes even went a step lower, but I was still getting a great workout! These workouts really are great for every body in any physical shape!!Honestly, Beachbody helped me get my life back. I workout every morning and still have LOADS of energy to play with Ty all day long! Sure, I still get tired (because I go to bed around 12..) but I'm no where close to how tired I was when I ate like crap, never exercised, and got enough sleep.It has now been 3 1/2 months since I started this whole journey, and I am down 23 pounds and have lost 17 inches from my body!! I mentioned on instagram the other day that I finally enjoy the process of going shopping and seeing how clothes actually FIT and look cute, for the first time in at least 2 years!!

I learned two very important things through this process:1. No one can make you workout or get back into shape. You have to be ready to change and make that decision on your own.

2. You can't out exercise a bad diet. Seeing weight loss comes from 70-80% eating healthy and 20-30% exercising. So don't think that you can see results with working out everyday and eating mac & cheese, chips, candy, and pizza everyday. (Although a few cheats here and there won't hurt! Key words being "here and there".)

I hope this gives someone the confidence and courage to make a change in their life. If you have any questions about Beachbody, their workout programs, Shakeology, or anything else, I'd be more than happy to answer them for you!! You can email me at shaylingetsfit@gmail.com . If you want to look for yourself, check out their website! Please know that I'm not at the fitness level that I want to be at, but I am still working toward my goal!! Want to join me? What's there to lose? (Besides inches and pounds, of course!!)

Tuesday, October 14, 2014

Oh Ty, you are absolutely adorable!! How have 5 months gone by already?! You are growing up to be such a funny, happy little boy!! At your 5 month appointment, you weighed 15 pounds 6 ounces and were 26 inches tall!

You are starting to laugh!! It sounds more like a grunt, but sometimes you let out a little giggle!
You love the song, "If You're Happy And You Know It"! Anytime we sing it with you, you get such a big smile on your face! You like the first verse better than the others! If we're in the car and you're upset, we'll sing it to you and you stop crying until we finish the song!
You love tummy time and laying on your back. You don't last very long down there unless we're next to you. You talk more when you're on your back. If I walk away for a minute, you're in there talking to yourself or Dexter, and it's adorable!
You are so very wiggly, and you never want to sit still! Barely even when you're tired, but I don't blame you! There's so much to explore and see!
You went on your first (and second and third) airplane ride!! We went to Washington with you and you finally got to meet my side of the family! You also experienced The Puyallup Fair!
We think you started teething because your hands are ALWAYS in your mouth and you're a little more fussy than usual.. still a very happy baby though!
You LOVE dexter, he can get you to stop crying any time he's near you! Although, he's not the biggest fan of your strong grip on his hair!
EVERYTHING goes in your mouth. If we hold your hands while you're standing, our fingers go in your mouth! Books, toys, hair, clothes, anything you can get in there!!
You love getting diaper changed and will smile and laugh and be super happy on your changing table! The only exception is when you're hungry.. You're never happy when you're hungry.
You stopped taking a binky for almost all occastions, and instead, you started to suck on your pointer and middle finger when you're tired or if you wake up during a nap. You'll just put the two fingers in your mouth and you put yourself back to sleep.
You still love looking at books and being read to! We went to the library for the first time together and picked out a few books. You loved it!
You are still spitting up a TON, and I don't expect that to change anytime soon.
You got to meet two brand new friends! Thomas Bogardus and Jace Lythgoe were born this month and you were happy to meet both of them! You really wanted to grab them both!
You love your little elephant/blanket named Ellie!! You stick her nose in your mouth and chew on it everytime you're in your carseat!!

You are seriously such a good baby! You really only cry when you're hungry or if you're super tired, but those can be easily fixed very quickly! You have changed our lives for the better and we absolutely can't wait for our future with you!! We love you, baby Ty!!!